Thecla

A) You were confused and actually looking at your own profile. B) You copy/pasted some popular quote that they were also using. C) Too many drugs.

FYI, if you join the Seraphim group in-world, these kinds of questions usually get a lightning-fast answer. The group is populated with shopaholics and fashionistas who seem to know everything. It's great.

Oh that's true, but BilliJo is deciding on principle, rejecting a technology that is neither good nor bad in and of itself. And there's a long history of this in SL, where users reject a development because for whatever reason they don't approve of it. There are sims where users have rejected mesh and continue to do so. What's curious is that it's basically Luddite behavior and the irony of that pretty strong in a virtual world. BilliJo, my pleasure https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Continental/182/210/35

So you decline based on principle instead of on practicality and the quality of your experience. All the wonderful things you've missed by doing that. That seems sad to me. I use experiences liberally in my sim to enhance the experience. It's what the elevator teleporter uses to move people from floor to floor of the main feature building. It changes the EPP based on where you are in the sim (I have 10 different EEPs running). It's what powers lots of elements of the build in my sim, providing a more seamless and immersive experience for visitors. I don't force users in my sim to accept, but if they don't, there's not really much they can do there other than walk around at ground level.

I would have thought you just divide the neck tattoo graphic between the head and torso textures. Tattoo providers as far as I know separate out neck and face layers because some people want the neck part but not the face part.

I grabbed the wrong end of the stick first, don't give Porky all the credit! Is there an AI that can take a photo and figure out the proportions and layout of an EvoX head texture? Probably not. And given that you can do it in Photoshop with a template and have far more control, I would opt for that if you want to actually look good.

Very pleased to have SEMINA performing live today at the Claris Cabaret at The Continental! 2:00pm SLT. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Continental/39/239/2252

Take a look at https://app.meshy.ai

Hello all, I have a full sim and I have set a landing point for visitors. There is a group for the land and the land is set to the group. The group gives members special privileges including "ignore landing point", which I assume is how you let group members teleport anywhere they like, either by double clicking (if they have that set) or via a landmark within the sim. However, it does not seem to be working for general group members while it is working for some other roles with expanded privileges. Is "ignore landing point" dependent on some other permission setting for a given role for it to work?

Many thanks to both of you. I've toyed with purchasing Avastar on several occasions, maybe now I'll take the plunge. Aside from the poses I want to do now, I'm sure I'll find uses for it in future. Last time I looked at Avastar I was concerned about it's update schedule. Blender is at 4.0+ and Avastar only claims to be compatible with 3.1. I would hate to buy it only to shortly have it break because it's not being updated.

I need to create a variety of static poses for holding things, and I would like the poses to only impact the arm, hand, and fingers, and leave the rest of the user's default stand pose or whatever undisturbed. I've been looking at tools to do this, and want to know what people think is the best ones to use and the best workflow. I'd like the arm/hand pose to be Priority 4. I have AnyPose that allows me to save out animations. I'm looking at the Fate Pro pose app for the hand/fingers. Do these work together and if so, is it a good combination of tools for this project or are there ones better suited to what I want to do? Thanks so much in advance for your help

This is not about LOD. This is about having the details from a high poly model baked into the the diffuse, bump and spec textures for the model without actually uploading a high poly model. For the model I showed above, I sculpted striations along the sides of the filet and added more detail on top which were then reflected in the final textures for the object, providing the "illusion" of more detail (and subtlety) in the mesh than actually exists in the uploaded model. As Charlotte points out it's generally easier to add detail than it is to remove it as retopologizing is an art in itself, at least as models get more complex. I think every model is different and as you gain experience (which I don't have a lot of), the best approach to take for any individual model becomes more obvious. I hope lol.

Thanks but I *think* that won't work because one tenant of the sim is a dance company and they use bots to fill dance slots when developing dances. Had not thought about that, hmmm. Guess I'm stuck with doing nothing for the time being. That said, are bots really capable of any sort of uncrupulous activity? 99.9% of them seem to TP out seconds after they entered.

Let's talk about bots. They are flashing in and out of my sim all the time. For awhile I did not pay them any attention, but I had a discussion with someone who insisted you really wanted to keep them out of your sim, mainly for privacy reasons. Not because of what you or your visitors might be doing on your sim (at least not for me), but rather because of the data that they can scrape. I ended up buying a product that would ban/eject known bots and make some sort of "educated guess" about others. I left that running until someone who clearly was not a bot got kicked, even after I dialed the "aggressiveness" of the product down to minimal. I ended up turning the thing off. So what's the word, is there any reason to be concerned about bots and keeping them out? If so, what are effective strategies/products that are effective to keep them out in the most non-intrusive manner?

Yeah that was the counter-intuitive part, because no one ever explains what "the cage" is and what it does. As far as I can tell, it's akin to a projector that projects the texture information inward onto the model inside of it. So I went from "completely and utterly perplexed" to "oh, that's simple" lol. And that happens a lot to me in Blender Thanks again for everyone's help!

Absolutely not. That is the height of deception and duplicity. The fact that you're even thinking about it as well ask asking if it's "OK" points to what probably led to you being unfriended in the first place.

I think how much detail you your mesh have should be a function of a number of things. In this case, these are temporary objects that are rezzed on a plate in front of a user at a dining table. So I want them to look good on initial close inspection, but not be gratuitously complex. I'm not concerned about LOD because the room is small. To a degree, this particular example was an experiment in seeing how much mesh detail I could capture with normal and AO maps that I could then take out of the mesh. When I remeshed the steak I kept in mind that it needed to hold the high poly version's basic shape and that I would be shrink wrapping it over the high poly version. Remeshing was essentially Un-subdividing, and all shrinkwrap does (and it's not even necessary) is deform/reform the low poly mesh as closely as possible, in terms of general shape, to the high poly version. So to sum up, this exercise has nothing to do with LOD with respect to distance and LOD settings. That's a completely different topic. I'm much more concerned about LI for this project simply because there will be numerous other things on the plate and I think that striving to make models as efficient as possible is a good thing to pursue in terms of modeling and texturing skill.

They all matter, and it's a bit akin to 3D chess. Even Spock would struggle. When I finally screw up the courage to change my head or skin every few years, I gather all the head demos, as many skin demos as I reasonably can, and spend what seems an eternity trying all the combinations...and editing my shape almost for all of them. It takes hours, and there are plenty of surprises along the way in terms of what I thought a given skin would like like and how I can get it to look. I will agree and that head and skin are the primary drivers of how you look, but shape can play a significant role in how your eyes, nose, and mouth look with a given head and skin, not to mention the large head shape sliders. Relatedly, shape crafting is something you should really spend some time on because the relationship between the sliders for different attributes is not always intuitive and the results can be surprising. The more you play with them the more you'll realize "Oh to get this look, I need to change this slider too."

Well, it was not that complicated at all, as it turns out. First, there are plenty of YT tutorials that show how to take a high poly model and reduce it to low poly, and produce a normal map from the high poly version. They are all virtually the same, but for some reason I thought the UV mapping of both needed to line up. As mentioned above, they do not. The high poly, textured model is literally projected onto the low poly version from a cage that does not give a fig if the high poly version has a UV map. A quick chunked step by step summary: 1. Take your high poly model, duplicate it, and leave it IN PLACE by hitting esc. Name the first high poly and the second low poly. Hide the high poly one. Select the low poly iteration and remesh it using voxels. Move the slider until you have something visually the same shape, but simplified, to the high poly version. Hit apply. 2. UV map this new low poly model. Then go to shading and create a new image texture node, select "new" for image, and name it "blah blah normal", and then add a new normal map node after that. Plug the image texture node into the normal map node, and the normal map node into the normal input in the BSDF node. Then highlight the original image texture node you created. Somewhat counterintuitively, this is the image that WILL be created when you bake. 3. Go to render. Choose cycles render, scroll down to Bake, and pulldown to bake type "Normal". Check "Selected to active" and in it's settings set cage extrusion to anywhere from .02 to .5 depending on how big your model is. This is the surrounding "cage that will project the normals from the high poly version to your low poly version. The number depends on how large and complex your model is in 3D space. Another option is to duplicate your low poly model, enlarge it slightly still in place so that your original low poly model is completely encased with in it, and set that as the target for your cage. 4. Push the Bake button. Download your new normal texture for your low poly model. There are numerous different workflows for this, but this is the one that I found most straightforward. You can bake other map, like ambient occlusion the same way, but they will require different workflow, to a degree. For example, for a good ambient occlusion texture you'll be best served creating a ground plane and a new light that you can adjust. All of that, to get the right AO lighting, will depend on what you're lighting, where it's going to be in SL, etc. You can bake the AO with the diffuse texture as well, but that requires getting familiar with shading nodes and what goes before or after what and plugs into what. I will say that learning this stuff in a way that helps you to "get it" requires working on your own actual projects and being willing to experiment. In my experience actual modeling in Blender is fairly straightforward, or at least it's easy to learn how to do certain things in hard modeling or sculpting or whatever, based on YT videos, and the real challenge is learning the in and outs of topology and what is good and what is bad and avoiding approaches that create broken mesh when uploaded into SL, and that make the mesh efficient. Texturing is the hard part in Blender. It's not intuitive at all, and texture nodes and how they relate and interact is pretty daunting. But it's one of those things that if you just jump in and keep plugging away you hit a various points where you say "ah. ok. got it. now I understand". Those are big reliefs when they happen.

Ok thanks to both of you. Yes I read about the cage thing and was not quite sure on what it did (possibly because of an erroneous/conflicting explanation in one video). Also using Shrinkwrap to better conform the low poly model to the high poly one after duplication. I think these together will give me a good result. I'll start experimenting!

Hello all. I've been watching a few videos on YT and attempting to take a high poly model and make a low poly version with the baked textures (diffuse and normals) from the high poly version. That said, the model I'm working on is texture painted by hand, from photographs after being UV unwrapped. When I decimate or remesh the model down to a reasonably simple mesh, and unwrap it, the UV map is different than that of the high poly model. Clearly I've got the workflow wrong. How do you get baked textures from high poly models to map correctly to the low poly model? I'm using Blender and this is the model I'm working on, just the meat. This is the low poly model with no baking, just texture painting. I redid the model higher poly for my current effort:

Well even the four sandboxes available to premium members are empty 99% of the time, which boggles me because each one is four empty sims. I think some sort of new group in SL specifically for social building would be a lovely idea, and find a sandbox available to everyone. There are plenty of them out there.

Builder's Brewery is great. I've not been to many classes or the sim, but the group chat is a great learning space as people are always asking questions and getting answers and advice. I've solved a few questions I had there myself. Also, the mesh and texturing sub-forums on these forums are great for that too. I've been building on and off ever since I started in SL back in 2006. And I have to say I miss the early days where all you could do was build in world with prims because back then building WAS a social activity in and of itself. You'd hang out on someone's build platform, chat and torture prims...for hours. Friends would come and go. It was awesome. When mesh came along I stopped building entirely as I was just not interested in spending hours off in some 3D program. I was not in SL much for a few years, but now that I've been back pretty regularly I dove into Blender and once you "grok" the basic workflow, it gets much easier. I love what mesh can do, but I still miss hanging out and building in world. A table I made in Blender and textured in Substance: I've stopped using Substance and am learning texturing in Blender. This is my first attempt at food (specific use case for my sim lol)...next step is to bake normals into it with a high poly model and slap that on a low poly version with some shadowing. Learning that today (hopefully lol):

If what you're talking about is the viewer *crashing* on login (and in my case, getting a BugSplat notification), vs. your credentials not working or some login failure, yes that is a region issue and it seems to come and go on some regions. I own a sim and I had this problem for a few weeks, to the point where I needed to set home elsewhere during that period. One thing that oddly seems to work 95% of the time is in prefs unchecking "View display names". I came across this doing a extensive search on "crashing on login" to SL. After you login you can recheck it.

If you need help with learning about the birds and the bees, a mentor is the last place to look for help. Honestly, I think arguing about whether SL is this or that, whether it is or is not a dating app, etc, pretty much completely misses the point of what SL; what you make of it, regardless of what the "primary use case" of the platform is. I have friends in SL who refer to it as "a sex game". Literally. And that is about 90% of what they do (the other 10% is evidently spent shopping for latex and lingerie). To them that is what it is, they have no interest in doing anything here other than hooking up. I know a fair number of content creators, some who support themselves through their SL business and many more who don't, who do it because they love it. Are you going to find those folks at Bukkake Bliss (remember that place? lol). Newp. I knew a few people who spend almost all their time making performances of one sort or another, or building sims, or organizing events. I know a few architects who love SL and even use it professionally. Heck, I know one person who spends all her time on a horse. I recall hearing years ago that Philip Rosedale left LL in part because he felt that it had devolved into a den of iniquity. True or not, I think that fact/rumor points to a perception about the platform that it's about sex. And any casual foray into SL will not counter that perception. Search in the places tab for virtually anything, sort by traffic, and dollars to donuts, 90% of the top 15 hits will be sex related lol. But get off the beaten path and you'll find hundreds of sims and tens of thousands of users who have other interests.